1. Interview techniques. Drawing upon the work of Colby (1951), a psychoanalytically disposed psychotherapist, Bordin (1968) enumerates three "interpretive" counselor response categories which can be used to conduct the interview. The first of these, clarifications, are intended to focus the client's thinking and verbalization upon material relevant to the presenting problem. They also serve to open up new areas of discourse and summarize others. Typically, clarifications take the grammatical form of questions, mild imperatives or simplified restatements-what Colby calls "interpositions"-and, because of their form and content, their highest incidence is usually during the beginning stage of counseling. A second type of counselor response is comparison, in which two or more topics are juxtaposed to present in sharper relief the similarities or differences among dynamic phenomena. This technique is central to explicating the inter-relationship of personal and career development. To illustrate, a counselor might respond to an indecisive client's unconscious rebellion against imposed parental occupational aspirations by saying: "On the one hand, your parents want you to be something you don't want to be, yet on the other you cannot decide what you want to be. Do you see any connection between the two?" Comparisons are probably most characteristic of the middle stage of counseling. The third technique, which is more pointedly therapeutic in purpose than the other two, is the interpretation of wish-defense systems, as exemplified in a case study cited by Cautela (1959). A client who was well-suited for medicine by virtue of both abilities and interests, and who was doing well in his premed course, expressed a desire in career counseling to change his major to architecture, for which he had no apparent talent. In subsequent interviews, he reported that shortly before his decision to consider architecture, his mother was almost completely paralyzed due to a cerebral hemorrhage and that his father had intimated he was partially responsible because she waited on him continually. On the psychodynamic hypothesis that "buildings symbolically represent the female figure," the counselor interpreted the client's contemplated shift to architecture as a way of "rebuilding his mother" and hence reducing his guilt over having originally precipitated her paralysis. Pursuing the implications of this wish-defense interpretation over a span of twenty interviews, which psychodynamic career counseling not infrequently runs, the client finally decided that architecture was an unrealistic, reactive choice, and that he would pursue his studies in premed.
2. Test interpretation. Bordin has made three major contributions to using tests in psychodynamic career counseling: First, in collaboration with a colleague (Bordin and Bixler, 1946), he proposed, in the spirit of the client-centered approach, that the client be an active participant in selecting the tests which he/she would take. A description of different types of tests (for example, aptitude, interest, personality) is given to the client, who then determines which kind of self-appraisal information might be most useful in terms of the career problem. But the counselor selects the specific tests (for example, the Strong Vocational Interest Blank) to be administered, since he/she knows what their psychometric characteristics are.
Second, once the client has taken the tests, Bordin (1968) delineates four ways in which they may be used: (1) to provide diagnostic information for the counselor; (2) to aid the client in developing more realistic expectations about counseling; (3) to make appraisal data available to the client; and (4) to stimulate the client in self-exploration. In communicating test results to clients, Bordin subscribes to the procedure developed by Bixler and Bixler (1946), in which scores are reported in as non-evaluative a way as possible. The counselor simply gives the client a statistical prediction, such as "The chances are about Vk to 1 that if you go into this occupation you will stay in it for 20 years or more," and then discusses the client's reaction to the factual statement.
Third, Bordin (1968) has suggested that this method of test interpretation not only lends itself but is enhanced by the counselor verbally relating the client's scores rather than presenting them visually on profile sheets or psychographs. Several advantages accrue from this approach: (1) the counselor can maintain a consistent role as a "collaborator" with the client, rather than shifting to one of "expert" or teacher who explains the psychometric meaning of test scores; (2) the test results can be introduced into the client-counselor interaction as needed, rather than all at once as is routinely done in trait-and-factor career counseling; and (3) the client has a greater likelihood of remembering the implications of the testing, because they have been expressed and integrated into his/her vernacular and thinking about career choice. There is compelling research evidence that clients either forget or distort test information disseminated by the traditional method (Froehlich and Moser, 1954; Kamm and Wrenn, 1950), a problem which can be largely circumvented by the counselor's verbal presentation of test results as part of the ongoing dialogue with the client.
3. Occupational information. The type of information about occupations which is integral to psychodynamic career counseling is that which might best be described as based upon "need analysis" of job duties and tasks. A series of such studies has been conducted under Bordin's general sponsorship at the University of Michigan on accountants and creative writers (Segal, 1961); dentists, lawyers, and social workers (Nachmann, 1960); clinical psychologists and physicists (Galinsky, 1962); and engineers (Beall and Bordin, 1964). In addition, Bordin, Nachmann and Segal (1963) have delineated several dimensions of psychosexual development along which occupational groups can be characterized in terms of need-gratifying activities and instrumental modes of adjustment to work. Knowledge of how and why members of specific occupations engage psycho-dynamically in their jobs as they do can be used to assist clients in choosing careers in which they may have the greatest probability of satisfying their needs. Thus, although this is clearly the trait-and-factor paradigm of "matching men and jobs/' the variables are personality dynamics (needs) and gratifying work conditions (satisfiers), rather than the static characteristics of the individual and occupation.
Comment As has been true of psychoanalytic theory in general, the model of psychodynamic career counseling suffers from the limitation that it disproportionately emphasizes "internal" factors as the most salient ones in career choice and minimizes external ones (Ginzberg, Ginsburg, Axelrad and Herman, 1951). The assumption is that "insofar as the client has freedom of choice," career choice is a function of individual psychodynamics, but scant attention is given to the conditions and variables which impose constraints upon the decision-making process (Crites, 1969). Moreover, from a behavioristic point of view, the excessive concern of the psychodynamic career counselor with motivational (non-observable) constructs introduces unnecessary complexity into the conceptualization of career determination, and rests upon the tenuous assumption that overt decision-making behaviors are somehow mediated by internal "needs." This criticism might be less telling were it not that Bordin has not yet devised and a priori diagnostic system which is linked to differentially effective career counseling methods. He is acutely aware, however, of the need for such a conceptualization when he and Kopplin (1973) observe that "it would be useful to make more explicit the differential treatment implications of this classification of motivational conflicts related to vocational development." They then propose some general considerations which the psychodynamic career counselor should make in treating clients with different problems, but these recommendations, for example, "the counselor must explore the family constellation and client's experience of it so as to understand how identity formation is influencing his learning" (Bordin and Kopplin, 1973), are hardly specific enough to guide interview behavior. Their value lies not on this tactical level but on the strategic one of fashioning career counseling to the psychodynamics of each client, a flexibility and perspicacity in approach which is too often missing from the pedestrian practice of trait-and-factor and client-centered career counseling.